


I Hear Siberia's Nice This Time of Year

by coinin



Category: The Losers (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Werewolves Are Known, Animal Death, Gen, Harm to Animals, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-20
Updated: 2015-01-20
Packaged: 2018-03-08 08:38:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,795
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3202757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coinin/pseuds/coinin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Losers crash in Siberia. Luckily, Jensen's got them covered.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Hear Siberia's Nice This Time of Year

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Chibifukurou](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chibifukurou/gifts).



> This story contains non-graphic harm to wild animals. If that might bother you, check the end notes for more detail.

Sometimes missions go well. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes, and these are Cougar’s least favorite sort of missions, they start out fucked and go downhill from there.

North Korea is a rather spectacular example of _fucked from the beginning_. The whole thing’s been a shitshow from beginning to very recent end, which is why Cougar is clinging grimly to the seat of a deathtrap helicopter Pooch liberated from a North Korean military airfield, while Jensen, wedged in next to him, is humming _The Elements_ under his breath like he does when he’s particularly stressed. Cougar peers out the bay doors of the helicopter at miles upon miles of dark forest, a hundred thousand trees just waiting to tear them apart and nowhere to land.

Clay grimaces at a particularly loud clank, then mutters “ _Jesus_ ,” at the sickening lurch that follows. “Hey Pooch,” he shouts above the noise, “how’re you doing up there?”

“Not great, sir!” Pooch shouts back. There’s another lurch, and the noise of the engine has developed a new and exciting rattle. “You might wanna-” Pooch breaks off to swear, and from the sound of it, pound on the control panel. “Brace yourselves!”

Things get pretty exciting for a few minutes after that.

Pooch finds a flat, tree-free place to crash land, a minor miracle which would qualify him for sainthood except that this unlikely clearing in the forest also happens to be a frozen over lake. The ice, as they discover, isn’t strong enough to hold the weight of a helicopter.

By the time they’ve all dragged themselves to safety, shaken and bruised all around, Clay has a concussion, Cougar has wet boots, Pooch has a concussion and wet clothes, and Roque looks ready to murder something.

“Wow, we’re fucked,” Jensen says with manic false cheer as they stagger to a collective halt in the lee of a bent tree. “The wet clothing, that was really the cherry on top of this delicious sundae of death by frostbite and exposure.”

“Jensen, shut up unless you’ve got something useful to contribute,” Roque growls in reply.

“As a matter of fact, I do, sir. If I shift, I’ve got fur, and Pooch can have my clothes. Gives us a little more time to find shelter.”

Cougar frequently forgets that Jensen is a werewolf. It doesn't come up very often - the military mandates that its werewolves take silver supplements to make them noncontagious, the main side effect of which is to make it very difficult to shift forms.

“Can you even change?” Roque asks belatedly, looking skeptically over at Jensen as he helps Cougar wrestle Pooch into the rest of Jensen's discarded dry clothing. “I thought the ssuppressants-”

“Low dose,” Jensen reminds him, yanking Pooch's jacket off and draping his own dry parka over Pooch's shoulders. The rest of Jensen's clothing follows, until he's standing naked in the snow, rubbing his arms.

“If you lash the packs together I think I can carry them over my shoulders. Jesus _fuck_ , it's cold. Look, head north, I'll scout and circle back to you if I find anything.”

Then Jensen is gone, and there's a wolf in his place, shaking to settle his fur. Jensen-the-wolf makes a quick circuit of the team, shoving his nose into Clay's stomach, demanding ear scratches from Roque, jumping up to lick Pooch's face (Pooch splutters, but seems more alert for it), and leaning heavily against Cougar's hip for a moment, before trotting over to the pile of discarded packs and looking pointedly from them to Roque. It turns out that with a few minutes' work and some creative buckling, they can in fact fit two packs on Jensen's back, balanced on either side a little like the world's most awkward and shoddy dogpack. When Roque and Cougar step back, Jensen wriggles to settle the packs, looks back at them and lets out a little _whuff_ , and bounds off into the gathering dusk.

Roque takes the one remaining pack, over Cougar's protests, nodding to the rifle slung over Cougar's shoulder. They get Clay and Pooch up and moving, and start the slow, miserable process of slogging through the deep snow.

Three-quarters of an hour later, by which time it is almost full dark, and they're navigating by the glow of the moon off the snow, there's a short, sharp bark. Cougar stumbles to a halt, hitching Pooch's arm further over his shoulder, and looks up just in time to see the yellow-green glint of Jensen's eyes as he trots out of the trees. He has shed the packs somewhere, and frisks cheerfully around his humans before trotting back the way he came. Ten feet away, he stops and looks back expectantly.

“Okay, okay, we get it,” Roque grumbles in mock irritation, but he can't quite hide his smile of relief under a scowl. Jensen wolf-laughs, tongue lolling out, and sets out at a walk slow enough for tired humans.

Their destination is a tiny hut, half built into a hill, dirt floored but with a stove made from a fifty-gallon oil drum and, best of all, plenty of dry firewood stacked under the deep eaves. There is a raised wooden sleeping platform built across the back of the building, a close fit for even two men, but at the moment no one cares. Roque starts a fire in the stove, Cougar fills the battered metal kettle with snow to melt, and Jensen curls protectively around Clay and Pooch.

They get off pretty easy with frostbite, all things considered. The tips of Pooch's fingers and toes are white and dead, but nothing bad enough to cause permanent maiming – at Roque's best guess, he'll lose the last eighth of an inch, tops. Cougar has some very mild frostbite on his little fingers, from where his wet gloves failed to insulate properly. Roque and Clay escape with nothing worse than chilled extremities than burn as they warm up.

Cougar wakes out of a sound sleep sometime in the middle of the night, searching for what woke him. Jensen is half sitting up, both ears trained on the door, teeth pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.

“What is it?” Cougar whispers, reaching out to bury one hand in the thick ruff of fur at Jensen's neck. The warmth is delicious, so Cougar leaves his hand there. Jensen doesn't respond, other than a tiny twitch of one ear.

A minute later, Cougar hears a long, drawn-out howl. It sounds far away, but Jensen growls softly, deep in his throat. Cougar shivers, tells himself it's just the cold, and goes to build up the fire again. Eventually, he manages to fall back into an uneasy doze, as Jensen keeps watch.

The next morning the snow at the edges of the clearing in front of the hut has been been disturbed; deep wolfprints marring the otherwise pristine surface. Jensen spends a long time prowling the forest, nose to the ground, before coming back to the hut and changing.

“Can they move?” He asks Roque quietly, nodding toward Clay and Pooch, as he wraps a sleeping bag around himself. He looks tired, Cougar thinks, dark circles under his eyes and a harried air.

“Clay's worse,” Roque mutters. “Pooch jacked up his legs somehow, pretty sure he pulled a muscle or two.”

“Fuck,” Jensen says on a sigh, Covering his face with one hand. “We've got a problem,” he says, muffled, before looking up and deliberately meeting first Roque's, and then Cougar's eyes. “More than this whole clusterfuck already is a problem. I heard wolves last night. Cougar heard 'em too. Judging from what's out there,” he gestures toward the door, “we've got a pack of werewolf sports on our hands.”

Roque hisses.

“Sports?” Cougar asks, because he's lost again, a depressingly common occurrence when werewolves are involved. He keeps meaning to do some research, but they haven't been in one place long enough since he found out.

Jensen makes a face like he just bit into something unpleasant. “They're, well... werewolf-wolf hybrids.”

Cougar blinks. That means...

“Yeah, it's just about as bad as it sounds,” Jensen says, when Cougar's disgust must show on his face. “They're also really fucking uncommon, for obvious reasons, so I have no idea what a whole pack of them is doing out here, but I smelled at least six of them, and possibly a few straight wolves besides. The smells are all muddled up, it's hard to tell. Anyway, sports are smarter than wolves, meaner than shit, and unfortunately for us, not at all afraid of humans.”

“You think they're going to attack?” Roque asks.

“You gotta admit, we're pretty easy prey right now,” Jensen replies. “Not until it dusk, I think. They'll know humans can't see for shit when it gets dark, time things accordingly. So I've got, what, six hours to get help? Eight? What time does it get dark around here, anyway?”

“Too fucking early,” Roque says. Cougar can't help but agree.

Jensen leaves no more than a quarter of an hour later, only taking time to gulp down some water and eat his share of their limited rations. He changes before he goes, lopes to the edge of the trees and stops to stare back at them before he disappears.

The day passes with agonizing slowness. Clay develops a fever, and keeps on forgetting when and where he is. Cougar gives silent thanks for Roque's presence, especially after Clay doesn't recognize Cougar and almost gives him a black eye. Pooch is lucid, though obviously in pain. As the sun creeps toward the trees, Cougar checks the ammunition supplies, rifling through the packs and coming up with not enough.

The tree-shadows lengthen, and darker patches begin to slip between the trunks. Little yipping barks announce the wolves' presence.

“They're smart enough to try to scare us,” Roque says, peering out of a crack between two boards.

“It's working,” Pooch says weakly.

In the ghostly dusk after sunset but before nightfall, the wolves come close enough for the humans to see their eyes gleaming from the forest. It's impossible to count them, not with the way they move like four-footed ghosts from one patch of blackness to another, but Cougar gets the unsettling impression that there are a lot out there. Maybe half are close to Jensen's size, one or two even bigger, and Cougar guesses those are the sports. They certainly seem the boldest. The properly wolf-sized shapes hang back in the deeper forest, darting forward only to retreat again.

“Come on, J,” Roque mutters as one of the biggest wolves trots into the clearing in front of the hut and sits down. It looks like it's laughing at them.

The wolf throws back its head and howls, full-throated and eerie. A second joins in, another of the big ones, and then it's one wolf after another, until the whole unnaturally large pack is howling along.

It might have been beautiful, if it wasn't so viscerally terrifying. All the hair on Cougar's body tries to stand up at once, and he crosses himself reflexively. There is no way they will be able to prevail against the number of wolves arrayed against them, and if the wolf-sports want their prey to die terrified, they're doing a good job.

The _crack – crack – crack_ of high-powered hunting rifles comes as music to Cougar's ears. Roque lets out a little whoop of joy as the lead wolf jerks in surprise, whipping around to where half a dozen hunters have emerged from the trees on a little rise on the south-east edge of the clearing, and are firing in turn. Their relief is short-lived, though – the reinforcements won't be enough, something that becomes blatantly clear as the wolves fall back, only to regroup in the trees and begin to circle around toward the hunters. The biggest wolf-sport stays in the open, along with the wolf-sport Cougar is beginning to think of as the pack's second in command, both darting and weaving across the snow, diving the hunters' fire.

A lupine shape breaks out of the treeline on the north-west side of the clearing, body low to the ground as it sprints across the snow, and the night is suddenly split by the roar of snowmobiles, their headlights blinding after the night's darkness. With the snowmobiles come another dozen wolves, these ones distinguished by reflective red harnesses, and dozens more hunters.

The lead wolf – Jensen, Cougar realizes with a surge of relief and joy – slams into the biggest of the wolf-sports, and they go over in a snarling, barking, mass of fur and teeth and fangs. The second in command starts to go to its leader's aid, but two of the red-harnessed wolves jump in, holding it at bay.

The snowmobiles get parked in a semi-circle on the slope, their lights throwing the whole meadow into sharp relief. Red-harnessed wolves work in small groups to separate the wolf-sports out and drive them in ones and twos toward the hunters. It's a practiced maneuver, and a bloody one, as the bodies pile up and the snow begins to turn red. Cougar adds his few dead wolf-sports to the total count, taking great care not to harm any of their unexpected allies. One of the red-harnessed wolves goes down, humans and wolves both rushing to its aid. Its whimpering is soon lost under the cacophony of snarls and shots.

Cougar gets a clear shot at the wolf-sport second in command, and takes it. One of the red-harnessed wolves that had been facing it down is limping badly, cowering behind its partner. When the wolf-sport jerks and goes down, Cougar's bullet in its brain, the uninjured wolf looks over for a moment, dipping its head in an incongruously human gesture before turning to its injured comrade.

A moment later, a sudden cessation of movement catches Cougar's eye – Jensen and the biggest wolf-sport are still. As Cougar watches, Jensen-the-wolf lifts his head from the wolf-sports' neck and raises red jaws to the sky to howl his triumph. The red-harnessed wolves join in, and then the human hunters, too. It's still strange and eerie, but this time Cougar can't suppress his grin as he lifts his own voice to join in the chorus, Roque next to him doing the same, and Pooch laughing until he coughs.

The handful of remaining wolf-sports turn tail and flee. The hunters fire a few halfhearted shots to hurry them on their way, and a group of the red-harnessed wolves peel off to give chase, but the fight is over. There are human hunters emerging from the trees, and humans and wolves alike move through the dead and wounded wolf-sports, slitting throats where necessary.

Jensen shakes vigorously and lopes toward the hut. He's limping and missing patches of fur, bleeding from bites and scratches all over his shoulders and neck, but he's panting cheerfully. Halfway to the hut, he changes, stumbling a few steps and talking before he's even gained his footing.

“Ow, ow, _fuck_ , ow, why do I never feel it until _after_ I change. Hey look, I found us friends!” He says with a manic grin as he reaches the door of the hut and collapses onto Roque. “Roque, buddy old pal, how's your Russian? 'Cause I could stay human and translate, but I'd really rather not, since this body _hurts_ and also no one will scratch me behind the earns when I'm human. Cougar!” Jensen continues brightly, “Thanks for not shooting any of the good guys. That would have been awkward, and hard to explain to Sergei. Sergei's the village headman, by the way, you'll want to talk to him, I told him to look for the giant scary black guy with the scar over one eye. Not very many of those in Siberia, can't imagine why. Okay, I'm going to change now, maybe crawl off and sleep for a million years.”

Jensen does change, but he sticks close to the other Losers as Roque introduces them to Sergei the village headman. The hunters brought sleds behind the snowmobiles, piled high with heavy blankets, and Cougar soon finds himself piled into one of the sleds with Jensen a heavy, warm weight across his legs. Cougar runs one hand between Jensen's ears, watches them swivel as Jensen tracks the people around them. "Good job," Cougar murmurs just before the snowmobile engines kick into life. Jensen grins a toothy, lupine grin, and then ruins the effect by yawning so widely he squeaks. Cougar laughs silently - some things about Jensen never change. He ends up falling asleep draped over Cougar's legs on the ride back to the village – the hunters had brought sleds behind the snowmobiles, and piles of heavy blankets, for which Cougar is deeply grateful.

**Author's Note:**

> Animal harm, detailed version: There are some wolves (and bad werewolves) that get shot. The Losers do some of the shooting. It's not in cold blood or for sport - it's a kill-or-be-killed situation.
> 
> Last year I turned Cougar into a cat. This year Jensen got to be a wolf. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this, Chibifukurou!


End file.
